Monday, October 14, 2013

Are the traditional disciplines (like philosophy) obsolete?

This
is the text of the monologue from last night's episode of Why? Radio. To hear
the entire episode and a detailed conversation about the nature of human
knowledge and understanding, please click here.

Universities across the country are experiencing
changes; administrators are restructuring things and altering how they hire
faculty. Most of it is awful, a lot of it is just an excuse to have more money
to spend on public relations, and a great deal of it is wrapped-up in power
politics internal to particular schools. But in the middle of it all is the
claim that traditional disciplines are either obsolete or a luxury, a loss of
faith in what gets called “pure research.”

The argument goes something like this: nobody does
philosophy, really. Nobody does physics. What they do is work on topics. They
are concerned with energy issues, or relieving hunger, or rethinking
transportation. So, nobody needs a philosopher or a physicist, what’s needed
instead is a group of people trained in various disciplines who can work
together to make better pipelines, or stop famine, or invent a more efficient
light-rail system. Research and teaching have to be more practical, the
argument goes, and faculty will have more publication success and get more
grant dollars if they are clustered around a topic instead of an outdated field
of study.

The uninteresting thing about this argument is that
it is really about profit and whatever subject is hip at the moment. But these fads
change frequently. The moment they do, the people whose work is out of fashion become
disregarded or, worse, get fired.

The interesting thing about the argument is what it
assumes about human knowledge. It suggests that the only way people can discover
is by asking the most immediate practical questions, and the only way any of us
learn is by working with people who share information about subjects we know
nothing about. In the case of light rail, for example, this suggests that
sociologists who examine how passengers interact must be partnered with
engineers who design train engines. In the case of famine, economists who
understand distribution have to work with geneticists who design hardier grains.

There is a truth here. Light rail, no matter how
efficient, will only be successful if it’s designed around how people actually
use it, and famine will only be relieved if the grain we send to the hungry remains
edible after it is shipped. In other words, knowledge is integrated and every
inquiry overlaps with many others.

But there’s something deeply wrong about the belief
that researchers have to work with people in radically different fields: the
history of discovery has shown us that the best, and sometimes the only, way to
learn stuff is to become specialized, to have some people working on some
things, others working on others, and have their results, not their methods,
accessible to everyone. This means that sociologists should work with
sociologists, engineers should work with engineers, and only after these groups
have actually learned something, should they connect. Universities are
necessary because they promote specialization first and cultivate a large scale
conversation only after there’s knowledge to share.

Philosophically all of this forces us to ask how knowledge
is actually connected, the subject of today’s episode. What does physics have
to do with philosophy? What does chemistry have to do with art? These are
questions no one would have asked a couple of hundred years ago because the disciplines
that we are all familiar with weren’t invented yet. The American founding
fathers didn’t study economics, political science, or sociology; they learned political
economy. Early universities didn’t teach physics, biology, and chemistry; the original
disciplines were natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and logic. The classical
Greeks taught music to help people understand math. They taught gymnastics to
help teach ethics. The modern world divided knowledge into specialized chunks; universities
succumbed to the division of labor around the same time that factories did.

Specialization itself is one of humanity’s most
important discoveries and despite what some will say, working on pipelines, or
famine relief, or light rail isn’t actually a specialization. It’s only what we
happen to be looking at right now. A university has to be flexible. It has to
respond to the needs of the moment and ask classic human questions at the same
time. It has to respond to how people understand themselves as human beings,
not just the trends. And this is what our guest today will argue. He is going
to suggest that how we map knowledge is based on how we map people—that we
can’t describe one without the other.

This brings us back to the university. Our schools
are built on how we see ourselves. Are we really people who only want profit
and to call attention to ourselves? If so, our universities should succumb to
these new administrative demands. But instead, if we are, as I believe, creators,
explorers, discoverers, and partners in a common world, we must return universities
to their most central purpose, the creation and dissemination of knowledge. I
promise you, our pipelines, our food distribution techniques, and our light
rails will get better along the way.

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